Chapter 02: Drs. Kim and Wu are introduced to the practice of reading very quickly as part of their training in the Knowledge Corps 

Shadows grew long over a school yard in Musea on a late summer day. All of its usual students had long left, most were enjoying their summer vacation and the others had already finished their summer classes or training. Over the course of 10 minutes about 30 newly admitted scientific and archival officers trickled into the school, amongst them were Lauren and Neil.

“The last class we’ll ever take, huh?” said Lauren, stretching her arms over her head.

“You could always take more classes if you want, but yeah, the last class we’ll ever have to take,” said Neil.

“This is so exciting! We’re finally part of the Knowledge Corps!” Lauren put her hands in the air.

“I’m also excited,” said Wu.

An information robot was stationed at the front door of the main school building.

“Greetings, the prereading training session is in classroom 312-B, please go up to the third floor and make a left at the top of the staircase, first door on your right, a map has been uploaded to your devices.” The diminutive robot’s message was also displayed on the screen in its chest. Neil and Lauren’s footsteps echoed as they climbed up the stairwell.

The setting sun gave the white walls of the classroom an orange glow, other officers were already taking their seats. There were no longer any pairs of available seats next to each other so Neil and Lauren took their seats at opposite ends of the same row. Lauren looked at her desk, it was a member of that ubiquitous class of desks where a plastic seat was grafted onto a desk. She hadn’t sat at a desk like that since her grade school days. She looked around, colorful posters decorated the walls, a rainbow colored alphabet of the Universal Phonetic Language wrapped around half of the classroom near the ceiling, the other half had the first hundred digits of pi. Neil, already on his laptop, was sitting next to a poster showing the combined galaxies with the regions of influence of the three multisystems colored in. She looked to her left out the window and saw an archival officer striding across the courtyard. Moments later the same person burst into the room:

“Sorry I’m late! But it’s okay, I’m here now,” the officer took a moment to catch her breath, “I am Dr. Garcia, but you all can call me Grace, I am a fourth year archival officer in the Educational Policy Research group of the Knowledge Distribution Division and I am here to share with you all the magic of prereading!”

Grace turned around and took her laptop out of her bag. She set it on the teacher’s desk and brought a presentation up on the main screen.

“Okay, so how many of you are Archival Officers? And Scientific Officers? Okay ‘bout 50-50. Anyway, as you know, for about twenty millenia, writing and reading has been the best way to transfer knowledge. The written word is ultra-portable and crosses both time and space with ease. One person can give a message to an unlimited number of people by committing it to writing. Unlike movies or talking where data transfer happens as fast as the speaker talks or the listener comprehends, whichever is slower, reading happens as fast as the reader is able to go.

“So we’re all Knowledge Corps Officers, we’ve done a lot of reading to get here, and you’re all going to do a hell of a lot more before you’re done. To do that you’re going to have to read faster than you thought possible. And that’s where prereading comes in, so prereading is the practice of processing two lines of text at once to tap into the brain’s tendency to fill things in. You may have noticed that if the last word of a sentence is really long, you don’t actually read the whole word before you’ve moved on to the next sentence. 

“The basic flow is, you read the whole first line, but while you do that, you read every other word of the next line. When you read the second line, you read the words you skipped while also reading half of the words of the second line. You gotta spend one thought about how the words from the next line can fit together so that you know what to look for when you move onto it.

“Now let me go through what prereading can and can’t let you do.

“It can’t let you quickly read documents that are inherently difficult to understand or which are poorly written.

“It can’t let you quickly read documents while you are sick or tired, in fact Prereading is a pretty taxing activity on its own. As you’d expect, coffee helps with prereading while tired.”

“It can’t let you quickly read formulas, sorry Scientific Officers.”

“What it can do is let you read an entire Sanmachi Times best seller in an evening.

“It can quickly give you the gist of difficult to read documents.

“It can let you read all the papers you read during your years in grad school in your first two years in the Knowledge Corps. Now take out your laptops and set them to receive.”

Lauren looked over at Neil as she pulled out her laptop, he was furiously mashing the spacebar before he Alt-Tabbed from the game he was playing to another window.

“I am sending you all the prereading lab software which you will use at home to practice. There will be exercises like remember two distinct lists of words or fill in the missing words of a sentence. Go home, practice, come back, get some more pointers, repeat.”

“Now with that out of the way, I want to share with you some key aspects of prereading. One, it is heavily dependent on the formatting of the document, each line has to be in a certain range of widths so that you have enough words to work out the gaps but not so many words that you can’t remember them all. 

“Doesn’t that really limit the stuff we can read with prereading?” someone in the back of the classroom asked, hand raised.

“Yes it would, but you can get a tool that reformats any website into a two column format for prereading, even text in images,” replied Grace, “although sometimes the result looks a little weird. Also, repetition in documents are more conducive to prereading, which is why some of you may have noticed that papers from the Knowledge Corps can sometimes be a little boring to read.”

“And the other thing is that prereading can only give you awesome reading abilities once you’ve also improved your base reading speed which is one of the objectives of the prereading exercises.”

The projector screen went dark, “And that’s all there is to it,” said Grace, “also, you didn’t hear this from me but I’ve heard that the Federated Academies Journals and Conferences Organization is considering switching their paper format to be written in Universal Ideographic in which case we would probably all have to take mandatory classes to learn prereading for that which requires completely different practice. But nothing is official yet.”

Lauren looked across the room at Neil and mouthed, “they lied.” Neil slowly raised his hands in an air quotes gesture that seemed to say, “‘last’ class.” Lauren hid her face behind her computer so that Grace couldn’t see her laugh. Neil smiled.